This blog is produced by the Consortium for Project Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for anyone interested in the practical application of leadership to project management. We aim to publish meaningful articles by various authors on a monthly basis focused on stories about lessons learned in leading and managing projects.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

The
Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile program was established to replace the
cancelled Tri-Service Standoff Attack Missile program, which had exceeded its
budget estimates by record levels reaching an estimated cost of $1,600,000 per
unit. The contractor, Lockheed Martin, was told by the US Air Force: “We don’t
have the time, we don’t have the funds, and we don’t have the answers. We want
a missile in half the time for half the price.”

Larry Lawson, the project manager for Lockheed
Martin, explains how in order to cut costs drastically, he had to enter an
unknown territory. For example, he produced components of the missile at a
small company that had been in the business of making baseball bats and golf
club shafts. This company had never built a military product, but they knew how
to weave carbon fiber and were open-minded. Their first prototype didn’t
measure up and took a very long time to build. When they built the second one,
they had learned what things they didn’t have to do or be concerned about. By
the time they started working on the sixth prototype they understood exactly
what to do in order to meet their objectives.
By the end of the project, Lockheed Martin reduced the cost per unit to
$400,000.

Larry Lawson is one of the more than 150
successful project managers, affiliated with over 20 organizations, that we studied throughout the last two decades. We consistently found
that these project managers were characterized by their ability to successfully
cope with change and with incomplete information and knowledge.

About 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, argued that the only constant in our
world is change. Today, the economic, social and political challenges of
globalization and the rapid technological innovations make this statement as
true as ever. Indeed, Peter Vaill, an American professor of management,
explains that the complex, turbulent, and changing environment faced by
contemporary organizations renders the leadership of these organizations like
navigating in “permanent white water.”

In using the "permanent white water" metaphor,
Vaill calls our attention to the fact that the external environment of
contemporary projects is full of surprises, tends to produce novel problems,
and is “messy” and ill-structured. However, it was the French Nobel Prize
winner Henri Bergson who a century ago proposed a concept of order that today
may help us better understand project reality. In his 1907 book Creative
Evolution, Bergson claimed that there is no such thing as disorder,
but rather two sorts of order: geometric order and living order. While in
“geometric order” Bergson was relating to the traditional concept of order, in
“living order” he referred to phenomena such as the creativity of an
individual, a work of art, or the mess in our offices.

All projects aim to reach a perfectly functioning product
with geometric order. At the start, they may face great uncertainty—living
order—that does not completely disappear over the entire course of the project.
Gradually, some parts of the project approach geometric order, though in an era
of “permanent white water,” the project as a whole does not assume
geometric order until very late in its life.

In a 1977 Harvard Business Review article,
Professor Abraham Zaleznik of Harvard Business School was the first to
pose the question “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” Zaleznik
answered resoundingly in the affirmative. He further explained that one crucial
difference between managers and leaders lies in the conceptions they hold of
chaos and order. Leaders can tolerate chaos and lack of structure, and thus are
ready to keep answers in suspense, whereas managers seek order and control.
Zaleznik added that the instinctive move of the manager to prematurely impose
order on chaos is more problematic to the organization than the direct impact
of the chaos.

Indeed, successful project leaders, such as Larry Lawson from Lockheed Martin,
demonstrate that they do not rush to impose “geometric order” prematurely. They
know that their projects will inevitably be affected by one of more of the
following:

Changes
resulting from the dynamic environment.

Surprises
resulting from the unique, and often innovative, tasks.

Difficulties
of coping with challenging requirements and radical constraints,
as well as with sudden changes in these requirements and constraints.

Numerous unexpected
events and problems subsequent to the above
difficulties.

Difficulties
of coping with these problems due to the typical unique, temporary and
evolving project organization, which is composed of
heterogeneous units.

The
stories which will be presented in our blog should help you embrace Bergson’s
classification of two sorts of order. It should facilitate your ability to
perceive reality as it is, to accept that you can’t avoid "living
order" in your projects, and that you should expect and tolerate it.

Reflecting
on the concepts, stories, and practices that will be presented in our blog should enable you cope better with your dynamic environment, deliver better results, and accelerate
your progress towards becoming a project leader.

______________________________

The Lockheed Martin story and the
“living order” description and discussion were adapted from our recent book, “Mastering
the Leadership Role in Project Management: Practices that Deliver Remarkable
Results,” FT Press, 2012 (Alex is the author of the book and Jeff is a coauthor
of three chapters in the book).

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What is "Living Order"?

Embracing the "living order" concept is the first practice of project leadership. Leaders must be comfortable leading in today's environment of constant change. Bergson (1907) identified two types of order: the traditional concept of perfect geometric order, and living order -- which can be messy, even chaotic, with project problems and surprises in an evolving organization.